


notice that all these things are music

by meredyd



Category: Natasha Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 - Malloy
Genre: 19th Century Russian Jam Band, Depression, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Music Lessons, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-15
Updated: 2017-12-15
Packaged: 2019-02-10 22:26:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12921501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meredyd/pseuds/meredyd
Summary: They’ve known each other for so many years and just as he’s learned the rhythms of her by heart she has learned his.





	notice that all these things are music

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Dussek](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dussek/gifts).



His first mistake was to forget she was arriving. Marya, even at her least luminous, sets a room ablaze the instant she enters it. Perhaps the whole countryside along with her. Pierre feels as if the lens of his spectacles will crack upon the sight. Being near her is somehow both a balm and a jolt.

“A fine way to greet me, Pierre!” Marya says briskly. When she ends sentences with his name it’s a subtle chastisement, as if he is a disobedient child. “After I've come all this way for a visit! Whatever have you been keeping yourself busy with? I hope you won't be wasting the season cloistering yourself away from the rest of us.”

She doesn’t expect him to answer. Not now, not like this. They’ve known each other for so many years and just as he’s learned the rhythms of her by heart she has learned his. There’s a time for her anger, both cold and hot, and a time for her teasing, but this is something else entirely. He had greeted her at the door in a dressing gown and nightclothes because it was all he could manage, and she knows this, Marya and her jewels which he has only seen her without once. His eyes feel like sores, his limbs, full of lead instead of blood, and he can’t bring himself to care.

"The girls, when they wrote me, they say you’ve been…unwell.” But you needn’t have told me, she doesn’t say. She doesn't ask for his help, unloading her things, moving each valise carefully into the entry room. 

“ _Dear_ old friend,” says Marya, closing the door to the chill, but there is no pity in it. Never pity, which he couldn’t stand. Something different, in the time since those awful nights, something that allowed for understanding when perhaps none would have once existed.

 

Through the house, she moves with a purpose Pierre envies. It’s not Natasha’s way of almost floating, feather-light, it’s a filling of herself solid into each corner, no wasted movement when there’s something to be done. Marya removes her hat, her overcoat, her gloves, and begins to work. 

And there’s so much, apparently, to be done. Surfaces to wipe clean, dead plants to prune, windows to uncover. She pours away the tumbler half-full of stagnant wine, the other of coffee, and makes them tea which smells like a campfire.

While Marya cooks dinner, she talks of gossip and parties and who will and has done what, where, and how. Pierre sits silent and shuddering, she keeps one eye on him until she sees he’s finished his tea and what’s to her judgement enough bites of soup and fish and bread. He drifts back to sleep with an ease he didn’t expect, and only realizes later there was a soft sound of a piano melody coming from the next room and that Marya must have, at some point, begun to play. 

...

Natasha is home from visiting and errands in the early evening, bringing with her a sense of some measured calm, and winter air mixing with the berries and branches she arranges in a vase. Pierre is doing the estate budgets, or doing his best to, the words and numbers dance around the page in smudges. He is a most ridiculous man, foolish and aching and lazy, indulging himself with thinking it acceptable. 

“I thought you lived in your study these days,” Natasha says, running her long fingers across the stitching of the quilts, one of which he’s now beneath, her pillows and beloved totems of comfort. Marya had left a fire burning in the grate that filled every room with necessary warmth. 

Pierre manages what he hopes is a smile. He’d thought himself quiet, but he’s never really quiet moving around anywhere, and of course Natasha would notice him missing as she tossed and turned in the early hours of the morning. 

“I caught Marya going out,” Natasha says, throwing her coat onto a chair, sliding out of her shoes. “She didn’t want to wake you. We talked for a while. She wanted to know—how you were, I suppose. How _I_ am.”

Natasha looks at him, helpless. She presses a kiss to his forehead, smoothing back his untidy hair, before winding in beside him like a cat. 

“Is it quite terrible, today?” she asks, then, taking in everything, the tight, grey cast of his features. A question not in need of an answer, and for that Pierre is as always hopelessly grateful. There's no asking or saying in it, either, when Natasha chooses one of her favorite books and begins in a low, soft tone to read, and Pierre remembers through the fog this happening before, these words he had read to her himself, in what seems another life and this one tangled together at once.

...

It had been Marya, who gave him the accordion, all those years ago. The piano was left in the house with the rest of the inheritance, rusting until Pierre spent a long, productive afternoon and evening cleaning and tuning it until it looked and sounded better than new. But it wasn’t only his, and he knew it, and Marya knew this as well the night she arrived with the dark, plush box, balanced without a single show of strain although Pierre grunted and stumbled backwards when it landed in his arms.

“What’s it—thank you Marya—What’s it for?”

“It’s _for_ music.”

“Marya,” says Pierre. He has it in his mind to brandish something at her. “What’s your angle?” 

Marya adjusts the collar of her stole. “I’d never come here with an ulterior motive, Pierre, and if I had you wouldn’t notice.” She draws a arm around his shoulders, one of the few people who can do so comfortably, Pierre assumes this means that the lesson on how to play the great mass of keys and bellowing nosies will come later. It isn’t until the fourth lesson (it’s difficult to play an accordion, something he’d never had reason to give any thought to at all), that he realizes it’s an excuse for her to check up on him. Count Bezukhov’s odd son, hiding in his mansion. They’ve neither of them ever discussed it. Pierre is not sure what it is exactly that made Marya like him, but he’d never once questioned his private adoration of her. 

...

He’s in the breakfast room, making another cup Marya’s repulsive tea when he hears her rap at the door, too purposeful to be anyone else. Before he can move, Marya has entered. He has only a moment to wonder what she’ll bring up of the evening before.

"I've been a terrible host," says Pierre. "And I'm sorry. There's no excuse for it." It feels like a nicety to please them both. Not something necessary. After looking him up and down and sideways for some time like an interesting piece of art, she seems to have come to a decision, or a conclusion.

“Why don’t you come out with me? We’ll dust off that old noisemaker and take it somewhere. Are you insistent on covering your windows for a particular reason, or is it simple carelessness?” 

“And good afternoon to you too,” adds Pierre, but the days he wakes up with the pressure lessened, some of the dreadful heft of it gone for reasons he can never explain, he feels generous, ready laughter behind his own words. 

“Get your coat, you fool,” she says, smiling. 

So Pierre does as he’s told, and follows Marya out into the day, where a troika is waiting to take them and the accordion case that sits between them somewhere that, Pierre hopes, is on the level. It is, after all, an accordion. 

 

The little club is all dark wood and curtains the color of wheat, giving nothing less than the sensation of being inside a dusty old music box. Four unremarkable walls and a stage and not a whole lot of anything else. Pierre instantly feels at home, but knows if he were to say this Marya's reply would be too biting for him to handle just yet. He helps her down and pays the driver, and together they carry the box through the doors. 

“And to his great surprise, who should have beaten him there but his own wife!” Natasha calls to him, her voice nothing but brightness. She’s twirling in the mottled sunlight the way she did as a girl. For a moment, they’re back there, strangers in a drawing room, but only for a moment. “Marya thought a surprise would make it more enticing for you to leave the house before the year was through.” 

“That isn’t quite how I put it, Natalya, darling—“

“Those were your exact words,” says Natasha. “You also said, “sometimes I would wring his neck as surely as I would yours”. Hurry up, you’re missing rehearsal.” 

She takes Pierre’s hand in both of hers as Marya places the case on one of the large, round tables and deftly fiddles with the latches. “I’ve talked to them all, they’re excited to play with you. Marya said you used to come to a place like this, every week in Moscow, is that true?” 

Pierre’s voice is odd to his own ears, he realizes he hasn’t spoken much today, in days if he thinks about it. The words tumble unsteady out of his mouth like chunks of ice. “Before we met I played there whenever I could. It wasn't much, it’s not even a real social club like this, but the people always seemed to — appreciate the music. I didn’t think about it,” he continues, half in awe at himself, “I just had fun. I don’t know that anyone wants me to play here, though, I haven’t even signed up.”

“Marya and I signed you up of course,” Natasha says airily. She sits on the stage, the backs of her boots hitting it as she swings them. Her voice dips in concern. “It’s your choice, if you’d like to or not.”

“I wasn’t aware Marya was giving me a choice,” Pierre says loudly. He thinks he can feel her roll her eyes, setting the instrument upright. 

Natasha’s face softens, she’s somewhere far away, and later, not now, not with the whole day still ahead of them and nothing yet to tarnish it, Pierre will ask her exactly where. “You know better than that.”

Pierre has to admit, he does.

...

He finds to his own surprise he likes the band, the other musicians, and tells himself he has no reason to fear them or their judgement, ignores with a slight desperation how badly some part of him wants a drink, or to run. There isn’t any reason. There’s nothing here but pure joy and energy, to play together, to discuss only exactly what it is they plan to do and then to do it. A few men slap him on the back when they see him, as if they’ve missed him, or they've ever known him. 

Everyone seems to know Marya, which is somehow unsurprising. He remembers himself, that he must introduce the Countess Natalya Bezuhkova formally, though she seems to have befriended even people he hadn’t noticed already. Presently, Natasha is chatting with a woman not much older than herself, with lighter skin than her own, tying her hair up in a yellow and red cloth, while Natasha examines her fiddle with the carefulness of someone who adores beauty and knows how fragile it is.

He remembers Sonya is away, their last letter from her speaking of the miles of lilacs she’d seen for Natasha, her thoughts on the books she’d been reading for him, the way they had both read it over and over and over. If he hadn’t, he would have thought she’d appeared in the corner of his eye. A woman who has been playing a harp in rhapsody from behind a curtain of red hair. It doesn’t seem to matter much who is who and from where, only that you talk about music, and talk about it with fervor. He can force himself to manage that.

“So why do you play?” Perhaps he’s giving off an aura of discomfort that attracts curiosity rather than repels. The man asking: tall and crisp, with dark skin and a close-cropped beard. Amid his seriousness there's an a air of unexpected kindness, he tunes his cello with absolute precision, but stops to smile at Pierre, so brief and thin it might be missed. 

Pierre, as he does all things, gives this due consideration. Long ago, there may have been a time that he said for the pure delight of it, but even then it would have been something of a falsehood. To escape, to forget, to belong. Because it lifted his soul out of himself, for just long enough. 

These answers seem to please him, and the others who are not so surreptitiously listening in, although all at once Pierre feels exposed and frightened of ridicule. The only way to respond, then, is to take up the accordion, find where in his muddled mind his fingers must go on the keys, begin, and continue on, more eloquently than his own words ever could. 

 

The room has begun to fill up with people as they move into the late afternoon. They drink, or play cards, or argue with one another, Pierre plays songs with the band he’s forgotten since the last time he was on a stage, since long before that. Each one tires him out, the exhaustion that comes from a long day of happy exertion, as if he is a child. It’s not until the final set, people bumping shoulder to shoulder, talking over small lamps and the smell of things cooking and secrets being told, that Marya deigns to join them. Crossing her heels, she raises her hands to the standing piano and lets out a violent melody Pierre has never heard but does his best to keep up with on his accordion, twisting, exuberant, complex. The shock of it sends a thrill through him he can somehow translate into sound, careful not to lose the beat, Marya’s perfect concentration and the wild demand for her encore. 

“Come, sing with me!” Marya has to shout, over the noise of the crowd. “Natalie, don’t think I’ve forgotten that voice of yours.” 

It’s as if something has come alight in Natasha that he hadn’t noticed was darkened. She climbs up the front of the stage with her skirts in one hand, smoothes them out. With a wild look to her, her voice rises, higher and higher, almost painfully so, as Pierre finds his own feet moving him to sit beside Marya at the piano. It's dreamlike, somehow managing to follow as if his clumsy hands could walk the path for him, soon forgetting in his rapture they were ever clumsy at all along with everything and anything else. 

...

Back home, Marya pulls out a chair for him in the drawing room, a reversed echo of a gesture so ingrained in one moment that he knows there’s nothing they need to say to each other about it. He pours her a drink, amber liquid swirling hypnotically in the ridges of the glass, hesitates, before pouring himself one too. Natasha began to fall asleep almost as soon as they walked through the door. Pierre could hear her singing the night’s songs to herself as she braided her hair and washed her face, still flushed from the cold and excitement. 

“I don’t suspect you ever wondered about a time,” says Marya, arching a perfect eyebrow over her glass, “I might have been a young woman of substantially greater musical talent than you, and the sorts of things I might have done then." 

“I might suspect more than you think,” says Pierre. He leans forward, chin in his hands, as Marya takes one long, satisfied sip. 

“Nobody knows each other as well as they think,” Marya says. “Even two such very old souls as us.” She places a hand on his own, awash with a true gentleness that feels and is rare, and he doesn’t flinch, or pull away. 

“Thank you for accompanying me, Petya.” She must be a little drunk, Pierre realizes. “I wasn’t at all sure that you would. The pair of you---as old as _you_ might be, you’re both still foolish children.” There’s something in her voice that for anyone else but Marya would be a spark of unmistakable fear. 

It’s a fear he can’t comfort. He only agrees with what's almost relief when she asks him to stay a bit longer, a week more, and to go with her again. When he can't manage it, they try a second time. Marya had taught him that much, in those early days, to play something on an instrument which seemed absurd and as if it wanted to do anything but make music, for the days when it inexplicably, magically did.


End file.
